wednesday books have shades of grey

[landofnowhere]

Shades of Grey, Jasper Fforde. Reread -- the sequel just came out (15 years later!) so I am rereading this. Plotwise this is a fairly standard dystopia plot, where a naive young man comes of age, learns more about the world, and falls in love. Worldbuilding-wise, this is doing some interesting things -- it's set well in the future, after a mysterious Something That Happened convinced people that technology and progress was a bad idea, and society was restructured around a new Rule Book that proposed, among other things, a color vision-based class system. In particular there is a scheduled series of Leapbacks designed to undo technological progress -- the protagonist complains that when he was a kid a Leapback outlawed gearing on bikes. Because of this, the technology level in the books mostly seems roughly early twentieth-century, except that there's clearly also some highly advanced technology operating behind the scenes underlying the society. The last time I reread this book I was struck by its LARPiness, which is definitely there, but I'm not noticing it as much this time. Still have the last quarter of the book to go before I start on Red Side Story.

Faust, translated/adapted/abridged by Howard Brenton and Christa Weismann. selena_k recommended this translation, and I hope to do it as a Discord group play reading in the spring, so I thought I'd read it first. I can better see what the big deal is -- there is some excellent language (that must be even better in the original!) But also -- I had some vague cultural awareness of what happens with Faust and Gretchen, but I was not prepared for the sordidness of it all. It left a bad aftertaste, so I read on to Part II, which is just incredibly WTF, I am not even sure what all happened, but wow it was *something*.

Comments

[selenak]

:) Re: language, that's why despite it being an abridgment that misses out one of my favourite scenes in part I I love this version best among the English ones I've found - the original has so much wit and poetry, and the 19th century translations I've seen otherwise manage to make it sound so leaden and dull instead, which is a crime. Whereas Brenton, being a playwright, captures that core quality.

Part II is what happens when you write a play over decades that's never supposed to be performed but wants to capture some of the quintessential change of philosophy and mentality you've observed during your very long life time. (I mean. Goethe was a young man in the 1770s, before the French Revolution. He was born into that late Ancien Regime world. He finished Faust II two years before his death, in 1830 (he died in 1832), with the Industrial Revolution going on, steam engine, factories, etc., but also everyone having caught 19th century morals and considering a glimpse of a female ankle taboo, nationalism on the massive rise (which was not his thing at all, and he was much resented for it), etc. But also it's operatic - Faust II, that is - Goethe once said wistfully to Eckermann that his dream would have been for Mozart to adapt it.

Going back to Faust I, that was a work of decades, too, in its endless revisions. Child!Goethe saw a Faust puppet play which remained with him for good, and as a young man attended the trial of Susanna Brand in Frankfurt who was accused and condemned for killing her newborn, which also stayed with him. (Gretchen isn't in any of the previous Faust legends, she's an OC Goethe character due to that impression.) He wrote about two thirds of Faust I, content wise, and not always in linear order before moving to Weimar and working for the Duke as a cabinet minister meant a decade of nearly no poetical work before he took off to Italy to find himself again as a poet. Now we do have that two thirds version, the Urfaust, which is still in prose, not in verse, because Goethe once read it to the Duke and a few select others, including a lady in waiting who right afterwards wrote the whole thing down in memory, bless, including Goethe's Hessian dialect, occasionally. Post Italy, he published the Faust I fragments, but by now versified (with one exception - there is one scene, and only one, that survived all of his revisions and remained as he wrote it as a young man, and that's the scene between Faust and Mephisto after Faust has found out what happened to Gretchen; it's the only prose scene in both parts), but wasn't sure whether he'd ever finish the play, and then the friendship with Schiller happened, and it was Schiller's Nol.1. wish for Goethe to a) finish Faust I properly and b) write Faust I. There's a fascinating passage in their correspondence where Schiller says what he thinks it's all about, btw.

Anyway, Faust: literally the work of a life time. Fanny's and Felix' letters are peppered with quotes and allusions, btw; quoting from Faust, subconsciously or consciously, became a German thing, and some of us do it to this say, much as people often quote from Shakespeare in English without realising it because so many of the phrases have made the transition.

Faust/Gretchen: I think because Gounoud's opera sentimentalizes it, and non-German speakers osmose the opera rather than the play, it may have caught you unaware.

[landofnowhere]

Thanks for all the commentary!!

I saw that there was also another theatrical translation by Jo Clifford (sometimes listed as John Clifford -- she transitioned after the translation was published) -- have you read that one? I thought I might compare.

Good to know about Fanny & Felix's letters (I should take a look at them sometime!)

Yeah, I think that I probably got my cultural osmosis of Faust/Gretchen through Gounod. I'm also somewhat curious to reread Bulgakov's *The Master and Margarita*, which I last read in college, because from my vague memory, it must have also been influenced by *Faust*, but its Margarita is very different. (I've also heard, that like *Faust*, it's supposed to be funny and not all translations get the humor -- certainly I don't remember the version I read as funny.)

[selenak]

No, unfortunately I am not familiar with the Clifford translation.

Humor is something all too easily lost in translation, especially if there‘s a temporal distance. With Brenton, from the moment I saw he got the „prelude in the theatre“ (starring The Playwright, The Director and The Actor/Clown) right, I knew it was in save hands. (Also, you can tell Goethe wasn‘t just a playwright, he had to produce other people‘s plays at the Weimar theatre for twenty years.) Whereas something like the linguistic playfulness in the Helen of Troy and Faust conversations in part II is hard to reproduce in English - Helen and all the Greek characters start out speaking in hexameter. Faust speaks in Schüttelreim, as in part one, which is the type of rhyme invented by Hans Sachs Goethe often uses in the play. (The English equivalent which sounds as natural in English as Schüttelreim sounds in German is blank verse, which Brenton uses a lot, but it‘s not the same.) Helen adopts Faust‘s Schüttelreim when talking to him - but Faust adopts her hexameter and that‘s what he talks in for the remaining play.

Another thing: Gounoud is of course the product of 19th century French Catholicism. Goethe, born German Lutheran, is an 18th Century Deist turned self confessed Pagan. Which isn‘t to say that some of the characters in Goethe‘s play(s) aren‘t sincere believers, but the plays very much go the „several belief system are valid“ road, and it‘s simply a different type of universe they live in than in Gounoud‘s opera.